Beach Boys – "Never Learn Not to Love" (1968)

Cease to resist

Come on, say you love me

Give up your world

Come on and be with me

The Beach Boys released the album 20/20 in February 1969.  It was the 20th album the group had recorded (including compilations and live albums), but the first to include a song written by . . . Charles Manson?

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Charles Manson learned to play the guitar in prison, and hoped to make it as a singer-songwriter when he was paroled in March 1967.  He moved to San Francisco in time for the “Summer of Love,” then moved to Los Angeles along with several members of his “family” – that is, his cult. 

Manson in 1968

In the spring of 1968, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson picked up two of Manson’s female followers and brought them to his house.  The next day, Charlie Manson showed up at the house, kissing Wilson’s feet and assuring him that he wasn’t there to harm him.

Manson showed some of his songs to Wilson, who paid for studio time for Manson to record those songs.  

Manson wrote a song called “Cease to Exist” for the Beach Boys, and they did so after rearranging the music, rewriting the lyrics, and giving the song a new title: “Never Learn Not to Love.”

Here are the first few lines of “Cease to Exist”:

Cease to exist

Just come and say you love me

Give up your world

Come on, you can be

I'm your kind, oh your kind, and I can see

Here are the first few lines of “Never Learn Not to Love”:

Cease to resist

Come on, say you love me

Give up your world

Come on and be with me

I'm your kind, I'm your kind, and I see

Here’s are some lines from later in “Cease to Exist”:

Submission is a gift

Go on, give it to your brother

Love and understanding

Is for one another

I'm your kind, I'm your kind, I’m your brother

Here’s the second verse of “Never Learn Not to Love”:

Submission is a gift

Give it to your lover

Love and understanding

Is for one another

I'm your kind, I'm your kind, and I see

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It seems that Manson was not happy with the Beach Boys’ version of his song, which was recorded at Brian Wilson’s home studio in September 1968 and released as the B-side to “Bluebirds over the Mountain,” a Beach Boys single that peaked at #61 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.  

He was particularly unhappy that the Beach Boys hadn’t given him a songwriting credit for the song.

Beach Boy Dennis Wilson with Manson

Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks gave this account of what happened next:

One day, Charles Manson brought a bullet out and showed it to Dennis, who asked, “What's this?”  And Manson replied, “It's a bullet. Every time you look at it, I want you to think how nice it is your kids are still safe.”

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In August 1969, Manson dispatched four of his female followers to actress Sharon Tate’s home in Beverly Hills, where they slaughtered Tate and four others.  (I would say five others, not four others: Tate – who was married to film director Roman Polanski, who later raped a 13-year-old model and fled the country to avoid imprisonment for his crime – was eight and a half months pregnant.) 

The next night, Manson and several family members invaded a home he seems to have picked at random and murdered the couple who lived there.

Manson was convicted and sentenced to be executed in April 1971, but the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment when the California Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that it violated the state constitution.

Manson in 2014

Manson spent 46-plus years in prison before dying earlier this month.  The state  department of corrections did not disclose the cause of death, citing federal and state privacy regulations.  (As if we needed any more proof that we’ve lost our collective minds, thanks in large part to the efforts of lawyers.)

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Charles Manson apparently left his estate to a longtime pen pal.  Two other men – one of whom claims to be Manson’s son and the other believes he is his grandson – may contest the purported will.  

Whoever prevails will take possession of Manson’s cremains, as well as the rights to his music compositions and recordings.  (The winner should immediately sue the Beach Boys, who never gave Manson a songwriting credit for “Never Learn Not to Love.”  In my opinion, it’s an open-and-shut case.)

He will also get 10 cents for each “Charlie Don’t Surf” T-shirt that’s sold.  (Those T-shirts depict a young Manson.  The “Charlie Don’t Surf” line is a quote from the movie, Apocalypse Now, that has nothing to do with Manson.)

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Here’s Charles Manson’s recording of “Cease to Exist”:

And here’s the Beach Boys recording of “Never Learn Not to Love”:

Click below to buy the Beach Boys song from Amazon:

Ronnie McDowell – "Older Women" (1981)

Older women, they understand

I've been around some, and I have discovered

That older women know just how to please a man

In the previous 2 or 3 lines, we learned about an Iranian wife who behaved very badly on a recent Qatar Airways flight.

Today’s 2 or 3 lines is about a woman who was guilty of a very different kind of bad behavior on a recent Delta Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Detroit. 

It seems that once that flight took off from LAX and the cabin lights had been  dimmed, a sharp-eyed flight attendant noticed that a female passenger’s head – which was partly concealed under a blanket – was bobbing up and down in the lap of her male seatmate.

The flight attendant reportedly told the woman to “sit up straight,” which put an end to the monkey business.  

I wonder how Kris Conrad would have handled the situation:

It turned out that the woman turned out to be 48 years old (i.e., old enough to know better), while her seatmate was 28 (i.e., young enough to be her son).

It also turned out that the woman had an 0.12% blood-alcohol level, had bloodshot eyes, and was (to quote the airport police who met the flight in Detroit)  “wobbly.”

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Would you believe that the couple were total strangers before they boarded the flight?  (Southwest allows you to pick your seats, but these two were flying Delta, which preassigns seats.  That means that it was purely random that they ended up seated next to one another.)

So either it was love at first sight for this May-December couple – how romantic! – or the unwatchable Snatched was the in-flight movie, forcing them to come up with another way to entertain themselves during the long flight.

Unwatchable

Several of the other passengers noticed what was going on.  But the guy sitting next to the couple was oblivious.  From the Detroit News:

One witness “felt bad” for the cross-country airline passenger situated on the end of a three-seat row where a man and woman engaged in a sex act, according to reports released by airport police.

“But I guess he was sleeping,” wrote the witness.

A Delta Airlines 757-300

The pair initially claimed that the woman had just placed her head in the man's lap to sleep.  

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

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The FBI's Detroit office, which apparently has very little to do, investigated the incident.  At first, the feds said that the couple could be charged with a misdemeanor, or even a felony.  But because their conduct didn’t threaten the safety of the passengers or the crew, it seems unlikely that they will be prosecuted.

One former FBI supervisor said he thought the frisky pair was guilty of “criminal stupidity – felony stupidity.”

But if stupidity was a crime in this country, we’d need to build a helluva lot more prisons.

Why didn't the woman wait until the plane landed, and then invite her new beau to accompany her to a nearby airport motel?  It’s simple – she had a connecting flight to Nashville, and he was flying on to Miami.

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The last 2 or 3 lines featured a song by an imitation Elvis Presley, and so does this one.   I don’t like the real Elvis much, so you’re probably surprised that I’m giving such prominence to a couple of Elvis wannabes like Terry Stafford and Ronnie McDowell.

Ronnie McDowell’s first hit was “The King Is Gone,” an Elvis tribute song that he released shortly after Presley’s death in 1977.  

Later, McDowell recorded a number of Elvis songs for the 1979 made-for-TV Elvis biopic, which starred Kurt Russell as Presley.  McDowell later covered the Elvis songs used on the soundtracks Elvis and the Beauty Queen (a 1981 made-for-TV movie), Elvis and Me (a 1988 miniseries), and Elvis Meets Nixon (a 1997 Showtime special). 

I’m going to cut McDowell a little slack because he served on board the USS Hancock, the aircraft carrier that my father served on during World War II.

The USS Hancock in 1968

I had never heard of McDowell, but he’s kind of a big deal in country music.  (He’s released 23 studio albums and 51 singles, and 34 of those singles cracked the Billboard “Hot Country Songs” chart.)

Here’s “Older Woman,” which was a #1 hit in 1981:

Click below to order the song from Amazon:

Terry Stafford – "Suspicion" (1964)

Ev’ey time you call me

And tell me we should meet tomorrow

I can't help but think that

You're meeting someone else tonight

There are a zillion ways I can unlock my new Samsung Galaxy S8 phone.

I can unlock it the old-fashioned way, by typing a four-digit PIN.  But that’s no fun.

It’s much cooler to use facial recognition to unlock the S8 – or better yet, the built-in iris scanner.

Eat your hearts out, you iPhone lemmings!

You can also activate the phone’s “Trusted places” option, which keeps the phone unlocked whenever you’re at particular locations.  

Likewise, you can turn on the “Trusted devices” feature, which keeps the phone active as long as you are connected to any Bluetooth device you’ve chosen.

Or you can use the phone’s voice recognition feature to unlock the S8 without having to type in four digits.  (Which is sooooo inconvenient!)

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The S8 and many iPhones (although not the brand-new iPhone X) also can be unlocked with fingerprint scanners.  But if I were you, I wouldn’t activate that feature.

Why?

A few days ago, an Iranian couple boarded a Qatar Airways flight in Doha, which is Qatar’s capital.  They were bound for the tropical paradise of Bali.

The nonstop flight from Doha to Bali is ten hours long.  The husband feel asleep soon after the flight took off.  The wife decided to have a few drinks, no doubt hoping to join her spouse in slumberland.

But before she feel asleep, she carefully picked up her sleeping husband’s index finger and pressed it against the fingerprint scanner on his phone to unlock it.

A Qatar Airways 777

Voilà!  All the husband’s dirty little secrets were revealed – including the fact that he may have been having an affair.  

According to some who witnessed the incident, the wife reacted exactly as you would have expected: she started whaling away on her sleeping husband.  There was also a lot of shouting and some unspecified misbehavior that was too much for the flight attendants to handle.

The pilot ended up putting the Boeing 777 down in Chennai, India (which used to be called Madras), where the couple were frogmarched off the plane, along with their young child.  (That's right – they were traveling with a small child.)

I hope the wife learned her lesson, and never pulls a stunt like that again!

And if you are ever tempted to pull a similar stunt, remember the official motto of 2 or 3 lines: MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS! 

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“Suspicion” was one of the 25 songs that Doc Pomus and Mort Shulman wrote for Elvis Presley.  (“Viva Las Vegas” is perhaps the most familiar of those songs.)

Presley recorded the song in 1962.  It was included on the Pot Luck album, but was not released as a single.

Two years later, Presley soundalike Terry Stafford released his recording of the song, which quickly climbed into the top ten.  (I believed for years that Stafford's version was actually a Presley recording.)

“Suspicion” sat at #6 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in the first week of April 1964 – the five songs ahead of it were all by the Beatles, the first time that one artist had held down the top five chart positions.  The next week, “Suspicion” leapfrogged over “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me” to take over the #3 spot, behind only “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Twist and Shout.”

Presley’s record company hurriedly released his version of “Suspicion,” but it was the record’s B-side, “Kiss Me Quick,” that charted.

Five years later, Presley’s cover of another song about suspicion – “Suspicious Minds” – became his final #1 single.

Here’s Terry Stafford’s recording of “Suspicion”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Bob Dylan – "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964)

Come senators, delegates

Please heed the call

Don't stand in the doorway

Don't block up the hall

My apologies to Bob Dylan for tinkering with the words of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” 

The original lyrics to that song read “Come senators, congressmen,” which I’ve changed to “Come senators, delegates.”  That’s because I’m not addressing members of the United States Congress – I’m addressing members of the Maryland General Assembly, whose lower chamber is called the House of Delegates.

But my message is essentially the same as Dylan’s.  The times need to be a-changin’, folks – it’s time for Maryland’s legislators to stop standing in the doorway and blocking up the hall when it comes to Maryland’s craft beer industry.

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The call that I’m hoping members of the Maryland General Assembly will heed was sounded yesterday by Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot, when he unveiled the “Reform on Tap Act of 2018” – proposed legislation intended to reform the outdated and dysfunctional laws that govern Maryland’s craft beer industry.

You can click here to read a press release summarizing the Comptroller’s proposal.

Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot

That legislation represents the culmination of an effort that began back in April when Franchot announced the creation of the “Reform on Tap” task force, whose 40 members included brewers, beer distributors, beer retailers, state and local officials, and consumers from every region of Maryland.

The task force held a series of public meetings over the summer and fall to examine the pros and cons of existing Maryland regulation of craft brewers, with particular attention to how Maryland’s laws compares to the laws of neighboring states – and how Maryland’s laws place its brewers at a serious disadvantage compared to brewers in those states.

Franchot’s staff – led by his very able staff director, Len Foxwell – drafted a report summarizing the task force’s findings.  That report – which was titled Maryland Craft Beer: A World Without Limits – makes a compelling case for enactment of the proposed legislation.  (You can click here if you'd like to read that report.)

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I was pleased when Comptroller Franchot asked me to be a consumer member of the “Reform on Tap” task force.

For one thing, I shared Franchot’s doubts about the legitimacy of the Maryland laws governing the craft beer industry.  If I learned anything from my years as a Federal Trade Commission staffer, it’s that much of the government regulation that purports to protect consumers from being taken advantage of by businesses are actually intended to insulate businesses from competition.  The fingerprints of special-interest groups were all over the Maryland laws that regulated brewers, and the Comptroller was taking direct aim at those protectionist laws.  

Also, I’m a big fan of local craft breweries.  As far as I’m concerned, there’s no better way to spend a sunny day than to take a long hike or bike ride and then adjourn to a nearby craft brewery for beer, food, and conversation.  

The “Reform on Tap” task force
meeting at Calvert Brewing

Maryland’s craft breweries come in all shapes and sizes.  Many are small and unpretentious – the setting is modest and the man or woman serving your pint is likely the owner or a co-owner, who is more than happy to tell you all about how the beer you are drinking was made.

Others are large and sophisticated operations located in busy urban locations that offer a wide variety of beers and very good food to boot.

When the weather is pleasant, there’s no better place to be than sitting outdoors at one of Maryland’s farm breweries, enjoying a picnic lunch with your beer.  If you’re with your kids or grandkids or a dog or two, a farm brewery usually offers plenty of space for the little ones to kick around a soccer ball, throw a Frisbee to your dog . . . maybe even pet a horse.

Have a beer and hang out with 
horses at the Waredaca farm brewery

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The “Reform on Tap” meetings were always quite informative, but I have to be honest with you: the best thing about those meetings was that they took place at craft breweries around the state.  After the PowerPoint presentations and question-and-answer sessions were over, it was time to sample the host brewery’s beers and get acquainted with the brewers in attendance.    

Quite a few of those brewers are young couples who gave up their jobs and risked their savings to build a business of their own.

For example, task force member Julie Verrati and her wife, Emily Bruno, are ex-government employees who left their white-collar jobs a few years ago to found Denizens Brewing, a thriving brewery and kitchen located in downtown Silver Spring, just a short walk from a Metro stop.

Julie Verrati and Emily Bruno
of Denizens Brewing

Task force member Carly Ogden and her husband Brian moved from California to Maryland only last year, just weeks after Carly gave birth to the couple’s first child.  When their plans to start a brewery in Baltimore fell through, the couple decided to open their new venture instead in the small city of Frederick “on a lark.”  Attaboy Brewing, which occupies a renovated warehouse, isn’t fancy – but neither are the hands-on Ogdens. 

Brendan and Bailey O’Leary are another husband-and-wife team who met when they were both engineering students at Georgia Tech.  The O’Learys – 30-year-olds who are the parents of two small children – hope to open the doors to their new brewery, True Respite Brewing Company, early in 2018.

(True Respite will be just a hop, skip, and jump from my home in Rockville so I’m counting the days until then.)

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Like other small businesses, craft brewers are subject to the vagaries of the marketplace.  Grain prices are unpredictable, utility costs fluctuate, and rents usually go up year after year.  

Consumers are notoriously fickle – they’re constantly searching for the next big thing.  The popularity of craft beers has boomed over the past few years, but there’s no guarantee that positive trend will continue.  

There are well over 5000 craft breweries in the United States, and that number continues to grow at a rapid pace.  You have to wonder how many of them will still be in business in five or ten years.

Brendan O'Leary shops for equipment
for his soon-to-open brewery

A craft brewery near my home went belly up last year.  A new brewery opened for business recently just a block or two from where the failed one was located, and the O’Learys’ new site is only a mile and a half away.  Will two breweries be one too many for my neighborhood?  No one knows for sure what the answer to that question is – if you’re one of those brewers, you pays your money and you take your chances.

Craft brewers like Verrati and Bruno, the Ogdens, and the O’Learys have a lot to worry about.  The last thing they need is for state or local governments to throw up roadblocks to their success.

It’s one thing when a business has to deal with government regulation that imposes costs but is well-intentioned.  It’s another thing altogether when that regulation is at the behest of special-interest groups who rely on their political connections to get the upper hand.

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The “Reform on Tap Act of 2018” would erase a number of arbitrary, anti-competitive, and anti-consumer provisions from Maryland law.  

I’m going to mention only the most ridiculous and blatantly protectionist provision in current law – the notorious “buy-back” provision that was enacted by the Maryland legislature earlier this year.

In general, a Maryland craft brewery can sell only 2000 barrels of its beer annually at its own taproom.  That brewery is allowed to sell an additional 1000 barrels of its beer but only if it first seems those 1000 barrels to a beer distributor, who must transport that beer from the brewery to its warehouse, offload the beer from its trucks so that it “comes to rest” on the floor of the distributor’s warehouse, load the beer back into its trucks, and drive the beer back to the brewery, where it can be served to customers.

What’s the point of all this wasted time and effort?  To generate a profit for the distributor, who sells the beer back to the brewer at a higher price than it paid the brewer for that beer in the first place.  (Gee . . . I wonder whose idea this law was?)

You can click here to view a .pdf that explains which current statutory provisions would be repealed by the Comptroller’s proposal.

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In most cases, that provisions would simply be wiped off the books.  That approach is consistent with what one brewer said at a task force meeting in June:

We’re not asking for anything from the Maryland legislature.  They just need to stop getting in our way!  Stop tying our hands!

That view is shared by each and every Maryland craft brewer I’ve met.  Brewers aren’t asking the legislature to pass a law that insulates them from competition, or that favors them vis-à-vis wholesalers or retailers.  They just want to get out from under laws that limit their ability to make and sell beer – and that limit the ability of consumers like me to buy and enjoy that beer.  

Carly and Brian Ogden of Attaboy Beer
flank task force member Sen. Ron Young

“Don’t stand in the doorways, don’t block up the hall,” was Bob Dylan’s plea to the government in “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” and it’s the plea of Maryland’s craft brewers to the Maryland General Assembly.

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If you want to learn more about the proposed legislation, the meetings of the “Reform on Tap” task force, and the events that inspired Comptroller Franchot to put all this in motion, a good place to start is historian and craft beer aficionado Maureen O'Prey’s Brewed in Maryland website.  Just click here to be taken to the “Reform on Tap” section of Maureen’s website.

Another excellent source of information about Maryland craft breweries in general and the “Reform on Tap” initiative in particular is Liz Murphy’s Naptown Pint blog.  Click here and you’ll be taken to Liz’s home page. 

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“The Times They Are a-Changin’,” which one critic has called “the archetypal protest song,” was released in 1964 on Bob Dylan’s album of the same name.

Here’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’”:

Bryan White – "Eugene You Genius" (1994)

Tell me, Eugene, I just gotta know

Can I go down and buy it

At the grocery store?

Pushing an eight-month-old baby around the neighborhood is thirsty work.

So after spending time recently with grandson number two, I was in the mood to drop by a bar with a good selection of craft beers on tap and a friendly bartender to serve me a pint.

Fortunately for me, the H Street Lounge in Washington, DC – which has a very impressive craft beer list – was just a few blocks from where I dropped off my grandson after our visit.

The H Street Whole Foods

Did I mention that the H Street Lounge is located inside a grocery store? 

That’s correct – it’s located inside a new Whole Foods store in Washington, DC.

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I had never been in a grocery store that sold craft beer on tap for consumption on the premises.

The H Street Lounge had a number of local beers, starting at only $5 a pint, including beers from breweries in DC (Atlas’s “NSFW” imperial black IPA and DC Brau’s ESB), Virginia (Old Ox’s “Black Ox” rye porter and Hardywood’s “The Great Return” IPA), and Maryland (Jailbreak’s “Feed the Monkey” hefeweizen and RAR’s “Bottom Feeder” blonde ale.)

Some of the beers on tap
at the H Street Lounge

Its offerings also included number of beers that didn’t originate in the DMV – including some exotic, high-gravity (i.e., high alcohol) brews.

For example, there were three beers from the Captain Lawrence brewery in New York State – including the “Seeking Alpha” 12% triple IPA – and Unibroue’s “La Fin du Monde,” a Belgian-style tripel that’s brewed in Quebec.    

Even casual craft beer fans are familiar with Boulevard’s highly-regarded “Tank 7” farmhouse ale.  Instead of Tank 7, Whole Foods was pouring “Saison Brett,” a hard-to-find limited-release Tank 7 variant.

Another rare beer available by the pint at that Whole Foods was Firestone Walker’s “Bretta Weisse,” a Berliner weisse that’s aged for eight months in French oak tanks called foeders.  

This way to the H Street Lounge

The famous Tröegs “Mad Elf” ale – a holiday brew flavored with cherries and honey – sells out quickly every year.  But the H Street Bar was offering this 11% ABV ale at a very good price.

The piece de résistance of the bar’s draft beer list was the 2016 Goose Island “Bourbon County Stout,” a legendary 13.8% ABV imperial stout that’s aged in bourbon barrels for the better part of a year.  

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You may think it’s odd to go to a grocery store for a draft beer.  

The Whole Foods that’s home to the H Street Lounge is as much a restaurant as it is a grocery store.

Like most Whole Foods stores, this one offered a dazzling array of pricey prepared foods that you could either take home or bring to the bar to have with your beer.  You’re not limited to a salad bar and some ready-to-eat soups and sandwiches – the Whole Foods also sells made-on-the-premises pizzas and sushi and ramen and bao buns and raclette and a whole lot more.

Smoked pork shoulder ramen

Nearly all the customers drinking craft beer in the H Street Lounge when I stopped by the other evening were also enjoying the store’s food offerings.  And the majority of those people had their kids with them.

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We have plenty of Whole Foods stores in the Maryland suburbs of DC.  But none of them offer craft beers on tap.

That’s because the great state of Maryland – unlike DC and neighboring Virginia – forbids it.

The Great Seal of Maryland

In fact, Maryland forbids not only the sale and consumption of draft beer in a grocery store, but also the sale of six-packs of beer to take home.

I’m not going to bore you with a long rant about lobbyists and special-interest legislation and all that jazz.

Suffice it to say that we Marylanders can’t buy beer (or wine) in grocery stores, drug stores, warehouse club stores, or other chain stores thanks to our terrible, horrible, no good, very bad state legislature.

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Maryland is home to a number of very good craft breweries.

The Whole Foods store in DC that is home to the H Street Lounge sells six-packs of beer from a number of those Maryland breweries – including Evolution, Jailbreak, Manor Hill, Monocacy, Oliver Brewing, and Union Craft.

Monocacy Brewing beers for sale
at the H Street Whole Foods

But once you cross the DC line and enter Maryland, you can’t buy those Maryland beers (or beers from anywhere else) at a Whole Foods store.  

Or, for that matter, at a Wegman’s or a Harris-Teeter or a Trader Joe’s or a CVS or a Walgreen’s or a Walmart or a Costco or a 7-Eleven.

That’s what I said – you can’t buy beer at a 7-Eleven in Maryland.  What exactly is the raison d’être of a 7-Eleven if you can’t buy beer there late on a Friday or Saturday night when the liquor stores are closed?

These Union Craft beers are also
available at the H Street Whole Foods

(Note: The statement that you can’t buy beer at a 7-Eleven is accurate in most, but not all Maryland counties.  Maryland’s alcohol laws vary significantly by county, which makes it almost impossible to make accurate generalizations about what is legal and what is not legal in Maryland.)

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Millions of Marylanders live just a short drive from DC or Virginia, of course, which means it’s not all that hard for them to cross state lines and contribute to the economies of our neighboring states.

This popular DC liquor store is just
one block from the Maryland line

Have I ever crossed state lines to stock up on beer and wine – thereby depriving Maryland of the tax revenues it would have collected if I had done my shopping closer to home?  

I think I’ll plead the Fifth rather than answer that question.

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Oklahoma native Bryan White was only 20 years when he released his eponymous debut album in 1994.

“Eugene You Genius,” the first single from that album, stalled at #48 on the Billboard “Hot Country Songs” chart, but two other singles from Bryan White made it all the way to #1, and the album eventually went platinum.

Two singles from his second album almost were #1 country hits, but his popularity waned over the next few years.

In 2012, White turned to Kickstarter to raise money to pay for a new album.  The $34,889 he received from contributors was enough to pay for only a six-song EP, Shine, which he released in 2014.  

Here’s “Eugene You Genius.”  It’s not the greatest song ever featured on 2 or 3 lines, but there are very few grocery store-themed songs out there.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: